draag me - Cassette Tape - "lord of the shithouse" - white shell with purple ink

Philly-based draag me, the project of Spirit of the Beehive’s Zack Schwartz and Corey Wichlin, is music for after hours internet wormholes, bus rides at night. Your eyes are bloodshot, the city from outside your window is grayscale, wet with rain. All of this is told through heady loops of samples, sinuous waves of distortion, the occasional moment of resonance by way of a keys or guitar. This is the kind of aesthetic terroir of "lord of the shithouse," draag me’s second record (and the first with Wichlin), the follow up to 2020’s "i am gambling with my life."

"lord of the shithouse" materialized during the pandemic. Schwartz and Wichlin, both stuck at home, sent emails to each other with ideas for songs. And over the course of a year, file sharing turned into fully realized tracks. Songs left on the cutting room floor of Spirit’s landmark record "ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH", got rejiggered, made stranger, and put into the draag me universe along the way. But make no mistake — draag me isn’t a Spirit of the Beehive side project, it is a project that exists in a swirl of its own. The songs on this record are far more knotty, circling the drain of psychedelic pop, industrial music, r&b, and electronic. There’s no need for labels here: "lord of the shithouse" is a record free of genre, and in its penchant for experimentation there is a real sense of clarity.